Interpretation (f)
Interpretation (f) states that engineers shall prepare articles for the lay or technical press that are only factual. Does this interpretation imply that a registered engineer could not write an article about the future of engineering? Very often, distinguished engineers are asked by engineering societies or professional journals to comment on the current state of a specific engineering discipline and to speculate on future development. Since the article will be future oriented, its substance will not be based on facts that are verifiable, but the article may still be valuable to the engineering community and the public. Or, the engineer may be a practicing author as well as an engineer.
Suppose you are requested by the local chapter of a professional engineering society to give a public presentation on the future of engineering in an area in which you have expertise. Should you accept the invitation?
It is ethical for you to accept the invitation to speak on an area in which you have expertise and to speculate about its future development. You are providing a service to the professional engineering society by sharing your experience with fellow engineers. Your audience, because of their own professional training, will be able to differentiate between the facts and the speculation
This interpretation applies to current or past technical knowledge. If you are authoring a forward looking article / book / story, then competence and factual matters (while perhaps important) do not matter. Isaac Asimov was a well recognized scientist, but his science fiction stories did not necessarily draw on his competence as a biochemist.
Progress in science and engineering increasingly is becoming a collaborative effort. Publication of work is one of the ways our contributions are communicated to, and recognized by, other professionals. Not acknowledging collaborators is similar to plagiarism in that you are claiming others work as your own. The tricky and sticky point with acknowledgment of collaborators is what constitutes a significant contribution to the work. Is the technician who built the apparatus to your design a collaborator? How about the statistician who did the analyses? Acknowledging collaborators and team members is a difficult task and is safest (and appropriate) to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion.
In professional practice, in which publication is not a major component of our professional reputation, this issue is often not of great importance. However, it is still expected that the contributions of professional colleagues be appropriately acknowledged. In the academic and research environments, authorship of publications is a key component of one’s reputation, and collaboration is the name of the game, so it is important to properly acknowledge significant contributions. The line between co-authorship and acknowledgment is also wide and gray. Good judgment is needed. Perhaps it is best to think in terms of the Good Works model and do what “ought” to be done.
Interpretation (f) requires that publications recognize all authors and contributors, and that the authors of any published work on which another work is based must give written permission for their work to be used. It further requires that all technical communications must adhere to accepted guidelines. But how should we recognize the contribution of colleagues and sources in situations that are less formal, such as job interviews? Consider the situation described in “Jack Fry’s Interview”
Jack Fry was a chemical engineering postdoctoral fellow in a multidisciplinary group of engineers, biologists and medical doctors. Jack was now close to the end of his post-doctoral fellowship, and was seeking a faculty position in a chemical engineering department. Jack presented his research at a job interview, including the results of several collaborators. Jack did not mention any collaborators who had helped him or contributed to his own work in his talk, but his last slide, entitled “Acknowledgments,” did list contributors. The department, very impressed with the wide range of Jack’s skills described in his presentation, offered him a tenure-track position.
To what extent does a presentation at an interview resemble a publication? To what extent does it differ? Did Jack adequately acknowledge the contributions of others in his multidisciplinary group of researchers?
A job interview is a less formal setting than a professional conference, so there are fewer established protocols for recognizing the contribution of collaborators in multidisciplinary projects. The key point is that Jack acknowledged the contribution of others and did not give the impression that he was solely responsible for the accomplishments. Again, applying the concept of the Good Works model, it would have been better, however, if Jack had acknowledged in each slide the contributor whose work was being cited.